Abstract

Populations in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) living on the fringes of forests indubitably rely on them for income and subsistence. But unsustainable practices can lead to resource degradation and depletion, threatening the very basis of their livelihoods. A forest-based ‘circular’ bioeconomy approach could stabilize sustainable natural resource use, yet bioeconomy strategies so far have focused mostly on technology and economics, rather than on matters of social sustainability. This study reviews literature published between 2000 and 2020, with the aim of identifying whether socio-economic impacts were taken into account in the forest sectors and bioeconomy elements covered in this SSA-focused literature. Many studies investigate forest-related value chain development across a forest sector that remains mostly traditional and largely informal. Non-timber forest products (NTFPs) play a significant role and could represent an entry point for bioeconomy development. Energy security could also benefit from taking a bioeconomy perspective. Forest activities resulted in positive social outcomes in just a third of the studied cases. Challenges to bioeconomy development include uncoordinated and often bureaucratic forest policies and regulations, as well as overlaps and clashes between formal and informal economic activities and land tenure regimes. Lack of knowledge and skills – around entrepreneurship, investment and finance – further hampers development. In conclusion, while forest-based bioeconomy could enrich the forest sector and contribute to poverty reduction and natural resource conservation, strategies must adopt a strong social sustainability approach, or this transition risks reproducing patterns of land grabbing, elite capture, spatial injustice and the displacement and disempowerment of rural populations.

Highlights

  • 1.1 Bioeconomy and social sustainabilityTransitioning to a bio-based economy offers the potential to reconcile economic growth with environmentally responsible actions while responding to current societal challenges such as food security, natural resource scarcity or climate change, by allowing the development of a lowcarbon economy and through technological innovations in biomass production and processing

  • Through an abstract-based literature review, this study examines a sample of 360 studies published between 2000 and 2020, with a specific focus on forest-based bioeconomy in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA)

  • 51% of the abstracts analyzed referred to traditional forest bioeconomy activities and only 8% of the studies screened looked at aspects of novel/modern forest use

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Summary

Introduction

1.1 Bioeconomy and social sustainabilityTransitioning to a bio-based economy offers the potential to reconcile economic growth with environmentally responsible actions while responding to current societal challenges such as food security, natural resource scarcity or climate change, by allowing the development of a lowcarbon economy and through technological innovations in biomass production and processing. Social sustainability is implicit in bioeconomy strategies because of the stated link to these broad societal goals and their aim to provide new growth and employment, bioeconomy approaches have mostly been technology and economy-oriented; the social sustainability aspects of the upcoming bio-based economy era are hardly addressed (Hetemäki et al 2017; Priefer et al 2017) Research on this topic is largely missing and scholars report a general lack of social sciences in bioeconomy studies (Priefer et al 2017; Sanz-Hernández et al 2019; Böcher et al 2020; Holmgren et al 2020; Toppinen et al 2020). At the same time, ‘sustainability’ and ‘sustainable development’ are two of the top ten keywords most frequently associated to (forest) bioeconomy in peer-reviewed literature; many definitions of the bioeconomy concept embrace the concept of sustainability (Paletto et al 2020)

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